With the growth in the professional or white-collar class of workers in industrialized countries, there has been a commensurate growth in the demand for career development information. For example, an aspiring professional, such as a college student, may seek information regarding the skills required to enter a given line of work, such as engineering. As another example, an employed professional may seek information regarding the skills required to move from relatively low-level work into management, or to move from his or her current professional field into another profession. Armed with this information, the professional can compare his or her own aptitudes and skills to those required for a given profession to determine whether he or she is suited to the profession in question. The professional may also seek information regarding ways to enhance or develop certain skills so as to advance his or her career in a given direction.
Such career development information has typically been provided through books or other written materials, and through career guidance counselors who specialize in providing such information and advice to professionals. More recently, as computers have become more prevalent in homes and workplaces, attempts have been made to provide such information through computer-implemented systems. Such systems have typically been limited to providing career development suggestions and/or career paths based upon a generalized set of skills. Such systems typically have not been designed to provide career development suggestions based upon a skill or set of skills derived from a job description.
In addition, existing systems have typically been mass-produced for general distribution, and have not been customized to meet the needs of a particular user. For example, the career development suggestions provided by such a system typically have not taken into account, indeed have been unable to take into account, the career development resources available to a particular user, or the professional field in which the user is already employed.
Moreover, such systems have typically been distributed on a physical storage medium such as a CD-ROM or floppy disk, and therefore cannot be easily and routinely updated as new career development information becomes available. As a result, such computer-implemented career development information systems have been of only limited usefulness to professionals.